How Helply got cited in 472 Google AI Overviews

I lead content and SEO at Helply, an AI customer support platform. Google’s AI Overviews now cite helply.com in 472 answers. That sounds like a win, and partly it is.

Only 16 of those answers name Helply, though. The rest use our pages as evidence while recommending someone else. Both halves are worth learning from: what got cited, and why a citation isn’t a recommendation.

What AI Overviews cite

Blog content, almost entirely. Only 5 of the 472 answers cite a commercial page, such as pricing or a comparison page.1 Everything else points to guides, listicles and how-tos.

One page does a lot of the work. Our guide to helpdesk ticketing systems for small business is cited in 102 answers, more than a fifth of the total.1

It also ranks #3 on Google US for “ticketing system for small business”.3 The cited pages I checked also rank on Google’s first page, so GEO and SEO run as one program.

How to rank in AI Overviews: what the most-cited page has

There is no switch for AI Overview citations. But the guide cited 102 times has a clear shape, and the other cited pages share most of it.

• It defines the term up front. The opening lines say what an email ticketing system is before any tool appears.
• It has an at-a-glance table. Ten tools, each with who it’s best for, its AI features, its starting price and its free tier.
• Each option gets a section with a “best for” label. “Zendesk: Best for Large Teams That Can Absorb the Total Cost” is a heading an answer can lift whole.
• It prices everything. Prices are quotable facts. On one search, the AI Overview cited a Helply page twice, both times as the source for a competitor’s price.2
• It answers the follow-up questions. An FAQ sits near the end, marked up with FAQPage schema.
• It is kept current. The guide was last updated on 23 September 2026.

The technical floor

None of that matters if AI crawlers can’t read the page. Helply allows every crawler in robots.txt, and each post arrives as full HTML with its BlogPosting and FAQPage schema.

That floor doesn’t earn citations. It makes them possible. OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s crawlers don’t run JavaScript, so content that only appears after the page loads can be invisible to them.4

Cited is not chosen

Here is the uncomfortable number. Helply is named in 16 of the 472 answers that cite it, about 3%.1

Take “customer communication tools”. Helply ranks #1 on Google, and the AI Overview cites our page. The overview then recommends Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, Tidio and Front.2

Over 28 days, that keyword earned 6,916 impressions and zero clicks.2 The answer used our research and sent the buyer elsewhere.

The pattern shows up across the site. Non-brand click-through rate sat between 0.20% and 0.25% each week from July to September 2026.2

ChatGPT is a smaller channel here for now. The same index records 17 ChatGPT answers citing helply.com, against 472 in AI Overviews.1 ChatGPT picks sources differently, which I tested in how to get cited by ChatGPT.

What I’m changing next

A citation is the first step. Being named is the step that pays. These are the next moves.

1. Name the pick on the page. Each cited guide gets a short block on who Helply suits and what it costs, written for an answer to quote.
2. Track cited and named separately. One “AI visibility” number hides the gap between them.
3. Get the commercial pages cited. Comparison and pricing pages are where buyers decide, and today they draw 5 of 472 citations.
4. Build outside proof. In my ChatGPT test, review directories and comparison sites supplied almost half the citations. A brand needs to appear on those pages, not only its own.

What to take from this

• Write buyer’s guides with a comparison table, a “best for” label per option and real prices.
• Rank first. Every cited page I checked also ranks on Google’s first page.
• Check that crawlers can read your HTML without running JavaScript.
• Measure citations and mentions as two numbers.
• Expect a citation to cost you the click unless the answer names you.